USB mouse with storage added

[Thice] wanted to try his hand at incorporating a USB driving into other devices. He chose to add storage to his USB mouse but didn’t want to alter the factory look provided by a color-changing LED inside. To make things fit he ended up cutting a good portion of a USB hub’s circuit board off and placing it beneath the mouse circuitry. You can see the board from the thumb drive wedged into one end of the case in the image above.

He sees this as a way of hiding data in plain sight. This is true, and it’s along the same lines we’ve seen before with a WiFi dongle in a mouse, or the thumbdrive in a controller hacks. To be truly hidden we’d like to see someone incorporate a microcontroller that monitors the mouse buttons for a certain code, and then toggles the voltage to the USB storage. This would simulate plugging and unplugging the drive, hiding it virtually as well as physically.

@Edward: Maybe reading the article instead of just looking at the picture would help you understand things better. The hub is actually cut down and hidden inside the mouse. It connects to the PC using the original mouse cable. The mouse and memory stick are then soldered to the hub.
Neat trick, similar to what the eeepc modding scene has been doing for a few years now.

The problem with this as a covert device is when you plug it in a HUB is enumerating NOT a mouse. Then a mouse enumerates. Im venturing a guess that this setup takes about 45 seconds to fully enumerate. Thats not fast. The reason for this is as follows.
Hub enumerates,
hub resets,
hub sees mouse,
hub enumerates mouse,
hub resets,

In device manager a new hub will show up. If you know where to look you can track where this hub is and what it has connected.
As it installs a slew of messages , and resets will occur.

VS what i suggested :
On plug in the mouse would install in about 8 seconds.
No other devices would show up but a mouse.
with one hand you could enter the “bootloader” magically the mouse disconnects and a composite mouse and msd will enumerate. This shouldtake about 20 seconds. The window for the Microsd will pop up automatically. Drop in the files , a quick key combo to reset the device and in 8 seconds or so your MSD device is disconnected and your mouse is back to normal.

When plugged in this mouse will look to the computer to be a hub and a mouse. Anyone who gains access to the mouse and plugs it in (or watches the screen while you plug it in) will be able to notice that there is a hub inside the mouse.

[Mike Szczys] noted that one could hide the flash drive by requiring a code before it gets voltage. This would not hide the fact that there is a hub inside the mouse and thus not hide the fact that the mouse has been altered.

My question is. How can one create a mouse where the only way of detecting the hidden flash drive is by looking inside, entering the code or some electronic analysis of the mouse (but to do that last one would require suspicion in the first place and is thus not a significant concern as far as this project is concerned.

@Edward
What if you ditched the hub and used a toggle switch to toggle the power between the mouse portion and the flash drive? You would lose use of the mouse, but who really needs a mouse to copy files?
Actually, if you wrote a script to copy the files you wanted onto the flash drive, called the flash drive with an autorun, you wouldn’t even need to type.

@Shadyman, reed switches are soooo last century.
Better to use an accelerometer sensor to detect the mouse being moved in a preset direction sequence to “unlock” the flash.

an interesting idea is to emulate a keyboard and write the driver in Notepad, do File-Save as xxx.drv to the root directory and “All Files”, then have the PC automagically load the driver using the mouse to select the driver from the list.
Only emulations needed are mouse and generic keyboard…

A nice and simple hidden storage setup:
Thumbdrive inside a wall enclosure wired to a female telephone jack.
Inside the pc the female telephone jack on the 56k pci modem you never use is wired to an internal usb port on a usb pci card.
When you plug your 56k modem into the wall telephone jack, instant storage device.
Fun easy project that I should really instructable.

Oh, there’s a plausible zone of declaring “White Hat” reasons for brainstorming exploit vectors to plug those holes. That’s an aspect of being a Hacker with honor )

I’d suggest the applications of this excellent Hack be things that are simply utility/functional. From that angle of approach?

Windows users that might have life get easier by the Portable Apps suite+ THEIR personal folders etc being embedded in the mouse or USB keyboard they keep with them.

Or- Flash-Puppy with BT/WiFi radios in that mouse or USB kybd as a service tool that bypasses a munged OS for legit saving of a user’s files. Hell, you can get REALLY extreme and cram a 3G radio into mouse or kybd as a way to export stuff you are pulling off a machine.

I have a USB hub epoxied to one of my Cherryswitch “service keyboards” that has an embedded trackball. Since the kybd was PS/2 and most of my calls would have been a PITA to access those ports-PS/2>USB converter FTW! It was used for a set of jobs reflashing Kiosk PCs. One USB plug instead of juggling flash drives, keyboard and mouse. By the 10th kiosk ticket that day, I wondered why I had not done it sooner.